Decoding the ‘Millionaire Mind'

Tanned, streetwise and laidback, T Harv Eker speaks in soundbites: “Every master was once a disaster”, and “People don’t make money. People earn money.” Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, the author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth and owner of mobile business school Peak Potentials Training looks like he spends more time on the beach than in a boardroom. Eker claims he can tell anyone, within five minutes of meeting the person, how much money the person has the potential to make. “Each of us has a personal money blueprint — a limit on how much money you can have. It is the root cause of financial success or failure,” he declared in an interview late last month. “Donald Trump could lose all his money, and make it back and more, his blueprint is set to unlimited. Lottery winners tend to lose all they’ve won very quickly. Their blueprint is set to low.”

Eker is in Malaysia from today till Sunday to conduct his three-day “Millionaire Mind Intensive” seminar, in which he resets participants’ money blueprint to “high”. He will also examine five critical ways in which rich people think differently from the crowd.Toronto-born Eker discovered his own money blueprint through personal experience. With a US$2,000 (RM7,000) credit card loan, he opened “one of the first fitness stores in North America” and turned it into a chain within two-and-a-half years. He did not name the store.He sold the business in 1987 for US$1.6 million, and then lost it all. “It was serendipitous. I looked at my bank balance and it was exactly the same as it was two years ago. Now in fitness, each person has a ‘set point’ on their weight. It has to do with metabolism and the number of fat cells they have. I was looking at my financial ‘set point’,” he noted. Unwilling to accept his financial “set point”, or what he now calls “money blueprint”, Eker set about changing it.According to him, the money blueprint is ingrained in an individual through upbringing, society and parents. But it can be identified and changed. “I went to seminars and learned the ‘accelerated learning method’, which I used on myself, and things started to change. That’s how the ‘millionaire mind’ concept came about,” he explained.

His new business, Peak Potentials Training, earned a revenue of US$50 million last year. While the company runs many courses, its keystone seminar is the “Millionaire Mind Intensive”. The programme incorporates techniques from the accelerated learning method, which stresses “high impact, high frequency and ongoing support”.Eker said the “Millionaire Mind Intensive” course aims to reprogramme one’s “hardware” from “cellular memory”. But you, the “hardware”, have to be present at the seminar. “You can’t do this just by reading the book,” he said, adding that the programme has given rise to more than 200,000 success stories. When the course was held in Malaysia last year, it attracted about 5,000 people. The current seminar is sold out. To Eker, getting rich is entirely about “who you are”, not about capability or opportunity. “Financial success doesn’t come from IQ. There are people who are just too smart to be financially successful because they don’t do much.

Thinkers are not doers. If you don’t do, you don’t get,” he declared. “It doesn’t take much to not succeed. But to succeed, you must be a more determined, bigger and more courageous person.”For example, he believes the downturn is a great time to “go shopping” because the economy will eventually recover. “What goes down must come up. When? Eventually! Rich people think long term, poor people think short term.” People who fail to seize this opportunity are acting out of fear, which is natural, but it stops you from being rich, he said. “Thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to actions, which lead to results. If you take out actions, you don’t get the results.”

This article appeared on the Management page, The Edge Financial Daily, June 12, 2009

Written by Emily Tan